You may have heard something about the huge push in Congress to overturn or weaken some of our nation's central environmental laws. Politicians want to pull back the scope of the Clean Air & Water Acts to allow polluters to skirt expensive upgrades to cleaner equipment and practices. They argue that such regulations are an impediment to business, and with our weakened economy, we can't afford to make corporations pay for their pollution. But how else would we safeguard the commons -- the health of the population and the environment -- from those companies' pollution? Last night, the Senate's newest libertarian stalwart, Rand Paul of Kentucky, was Jon Stewart's guest on the Daily Show, and surprisingly, they dedicated a large portion of the show to tackling this very issue:

Now, the most important thing to keep in mind here is how Paul keeps repeating the refrain that "things are a lot better now" for the environment than they were in the 60s and before, but he fails to acknowledge that this is almost exclusively thanks to the implementation of a series of powerful environmental laws: The Clean Water Act, the creation of the EPA, and the Clean Air Act.

Holding corporations accountable to the standards they created has forced them to pollute less and run cleaner operations -- the American business community didn't just uniformly decide to clean up their ways for the betterment of the public (despite what they may want you to think). It was years of holding corporations' feet to the fire, the promise of expensive and irritating lawsuits, and the potential of punitive fines that got them to green up their acts -- not a change of heart.

Accounting for environmental protection is one of the biggest challenges that libertarians and free market fundamentalists face -- there's no good way to get businesses to pollute less, to safely dispose of waste, or to protect animal populations from their operations. There's simply no market incentive for businesses to account for so-called negative externalities; on the contrary, it's usually cheaper for businesses to choose not to operate in an environmentally conscious manner.